What is an Aptamer?

Aptamers are single-stranded nucleic acids with defined and stable tertiary structures that bind with high affinity and specificity to target molecules. Aptamers adopt a wide variety of structural motifs, such as stems, hairpins, bulges, pseudoknots, and G-quadruplexes, recognizing with their target via diverse interactions such as hydrogen bonds, hydrophobic interactions, van der Waals interactions, aromatic stacking, and so on.

Their affinity can be compared to antibodies, but the cost of their production is significantly less expensive than the antibodies.

The steps we have been gone through to obtain aptamers are: